1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to educational services, and specifically to the teaching and testing using technology.
2. Related Art
In the last decade, a lot of technical developments have made communication easy and widely available. Education of children has not caught up with changes in lifestyles. Educational services have not adapted adequately to employ new tools and technologies that can deliver more effective education. For example, mobile phones of all kinds have proliferated all over the world. Some of them are small tiny cellular phones, others are more powerful and flexible smartphones, some are small electronic tablets and tiny netbooks, etc. All of these are very convenient to use. But our schools not only ban the use of mobile devices during school hours but also do not encourage their use for educational needs. In fact, schools in general are not equipped to employ newer technologies that can make learning interesting and easy.
Some schools have computer labs where students watch a demonstration of an experiment. Some schools allow their users to browse the web for information. Some educational websites have put up books online that a user can browse. Most of these websites are good at providing some sections of a book for perusal by a user using a browser. However, children need to be able to get to a computer/laptop to access these sites—not many students have access to computers in this world. In addition to computers/laptops, a student needs broadband connections to browse these content rich websites.
A number of high school children every year take standardized tests such SAT and ACT exams, and many of them attend SAT and ACT preparatory classes. These classes are fast paced and useful. However these classes require a student to physically attend these sessions, and they add to the educational burden of these students and eat into their time for studies. Often students purchase test practice work books and use them to get acclimatized to the test situations. These work books are big fat heavy books and are quite inconvenient to carry and daunting to a student. These books often put-off a an aspiring student.
The Internet is a very powerful communication means and quite often, the mobile devices available in the world can employ the Internet for communication. Most of them also employ the telecom networks (such as cellular networks) for communication. Some of the mobile devices can use both the Internet as well as the telecom networks for communications.
People using mobile devices such as mobile phones often find a camera embedded in the mobile phones and take pictures. Some of them are also capable of emailing these pictures to friends. Of late, some mobile devices have become capable of displaying digital videos and movies. Some of them are also able to capture small digital video clips. Various mobile applications have been created and the demand for them is increasing. Mobile phone users, for example, can download thousands of mobile apps and often clutter up their mobile phones. However, there are very no mobile apps that address educational services. Similarly, there are no mobile apps that address testing services.
These is a need to make mobile applications for education. There is a need to make such mobile applications address the need of students to communicate with each other and with instructors. There are no easy solutions available to solve this problem.
In general, creation of a new mobile application takes a lot of time, energy and resources. It takes a team well versed in software development and testing. It takes a team that has access to and mastery of new technology. It takes PCs, servers, code management systems, simulators integrated development environments (IDE), etc. Thus, only a few large corporations have the people and resources to develop mobile apps for their use. And these corporations have not created any useful mobile app that addresses teaching needs, testing needs, registration needs, user interaction needs, automated remedial coursework determination, etc.
Students often take tests and do not know how they have performed on the test, or in which areas they need to improve. Quite often, it is difficult for a student to determine how he can improve his test score. The student may know that he is weak in some subject, but not know what to do with it or how to improve his skills. The student often does not have access to information that can help him do better in his tests if he retakes that test. The student is left to fend for himself, and any study material or study guides he might need may not be easily available in the stores or even at school.
In view of the foregoing considerations, it is clear that there is a need for a mobile based learning and testing system that provides automated test assignment, automated class registrations and customized material delivery.